Things worth knowing

Friday, 11 April 2014

It's the last day of term today! That means no more teaching for this year. Wow. In honour of this, we had a party for our students on Wednesday which was really fun:

I also learnt something interesting. We use the term 'fresher' colloquially to refer to a first year student, particularly when it's the start of the year and they're arriving for the first time (so you have a freshers' fair, etc). I always assumed it was a shortening of the American term 'freshman', which we don't use here but which is totally standard over there. Turns out that maybe it is, but they don't use 'fresher' there - only the full form. So it seems like we somehow borrowed a clipped form which doesn't exist in its original context without ever borrowing the full form.